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A biotech company partnering with major pharmaceutical players like Lilly on Covid-19 drug development is raising $105 million in funding to ramp up.
AbCellera announced on Wednesday that it raised that sum in a Series B funding round led by OrbiMed and DCVC Bio. The investment takes the company’s total funding to about $115 million in its eighth year of operation.
“Now that we’re getting a reputation of being at the top of antibody discovery, this is an opportunity to expand our capacity, change our posture and pursue a more aggressive growth strategy,” says CEO and cofounder Carl Hansen.
Based in Vancouver, AbCellera focuses on the efficient, effective discovery of antibodies that have the potential to be used as a treatment for a variety of diseases, including cancer and neurodegeneration and infections such as influenza and Covid-19. Using microfluidic technology, which enables the automation of some basic research functions, the company is able to process samples containing potentially useful antibodies quickly, running thousands of scans at a time and analyzing them with machine learning to quickly identify the best candidates to develop into new therapies.
“We interrogate millions of immune cells and pull out the ones that have properties that are good for drugs,” says Hansen. “Then we break those cells open and sequence their DNA.”
The genomic sequences of those antibodies are analyzed for its ease of manufacture. Promising ones can then be scaled up and manufactured in using different types of cells. It’s a similar process, Hansen says, to the fermentation used to make beer.
AbCellera draws its roots from research that Hansen began at the University of British Columbia in 2005, where he was focused on combining genomics, microfluidics and other methods to quickly sort through thousands of samples to discover targets for drug discovery. In 2012, he and four others cofounded AbCellera (“In a tiny little lab at UBC,” Hansen recalls), with about $725,000 in funds raised from friends and family.
Three years later, the company entered its first partnerships with pharmaceutical companies, and began to grow by leaps and bounds, according to Hansen. “We’ve been essentially doubling revenue and headcount every year,” he says. Partners now include pharmaceutical powerhouses like Lilly, Pfizer, Gilead and Novartis.
This year, the company acted quickly to develop a treatment with potential use against Covid-19. After receiving samples from patients who’d recovered from the disease in February, it took the company fewer than ten days to find promising antibody candidates, which it then presented to Lilly for consideration. The companies announced a development and manufacturing partnership on March 12, and Lilly stated in April that it expects to file an Investigational New Drug application with the FDA for the therapy by the end of May, with clinical trials to start shortly thereafter.
“Our philosophy here is that we all benefit when the best science has access to the best technology.”
AbCellera had only raised $10 million from investors prior to Wednesday, consisting of a Series A round led by Data Collective in 2018. With this new $105 million round, Hansen says the company is looking to scale up its operations by hiring up to 100 new people (to add to its current workforce of about 140). It’s also looking to build a new research and development facility in Vancouver and increase manufacturing capabilities there, Hansen adds. The company has plenty of believers—the investor syndicate in this Series B round includes Presight Capital, Founders Fund, Viking Global Investors, the University of Minnesota, Eli Lilly and Co. and Peter Thiel.
Antibody therapies are a fast-growing segment of the pharmaceutical industry, with a number of companies looking to develop ways to improve treatments for cancer and other diseases. AbCellara is far from the only private player to work on developing antibody therapies against Covid-19, with several clinical trials in process. AbCellera’s advantage, its CEO claims, is its combination of methods that quickly and efficiently identify effective drug targets to compress the discovery timeline.
“Our philosophy here is that we all benefit when the best science has access to the best technology,” Hansen says. “I think we can elevate the whole industry if we make these investments in our capabilities and keep them open to the world.”